Blu-Ray Players Finally Cheap. Will Anyone Care?

Among Yahoo's (YHOO) 10 best Black Friday deals: A $128 Magnavox Blu-ray player at Wal-Mart (WMT). We imagine other stores will have similar deals. (And if they get desperate, maybe even cheaper by the time Christmas rolls around.)

But in a tanking consumer econony, will that be cheap enough for anyone to care?

Blu-ray's backers, including Sony (SNE), are counting on this Christmas and the next few years to get Blu-ray to catch on before digital delivery takes off. But so far, only about 4% of movie disc sales are Blu-ray, according to Nielsen.

Cheaper players should help, but we think it's still far too soon to declare Blu-ray a winner. One thing that still needs to happen: Studios need to stop charging so much for the movies themselves. Most new releases are $30 to $35 on Best Buy's (BBY) Web site -- probably $10 to $25 more than most people will want to pay for them.